Use Advances vs. Declines chart to understand change in values

Lets say you are responsible for sales of 100s of products (which belong to handful of categories). You are looking at sales of each product in last month & this month. And you want to understand whether sales are improving or declining by category. How would you do it?

Turns out, this is not a difficult problem. In fact, this question is asked every day & answered using Advances vs. Declines chart.

You may have seen this chart in financial newspapers or websites. Shown below, Advances vs. Declines chart tells us how many items have advanced & how many have declined.

When should you use Advances vs. Declines chart?

As you can see, advances vs. declines chart does not give low level details about actual movement of values. Instead, it gives you a sense of what is going on. Use it in below situations:

To get a feel of how values have changed over time.

When you are dealing with data that constantly changes (sales, number of customers, defects etc.)

Create Advances vs. Declines chart in Excel

You can easily create this chart in Excel from raw data. Just follow below tutorial.

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This is great.
Would there be a way of varying this so that instead of the centre being 0, it could be an average amount and the sides showing the over or under amount or % they are from the average score? Thanks.

Hi Chandoo,
I tried the same on my sheets and it didn’t happen, I’ve been racking my brains to figure out what went wrong. I identified the range names, but all the values were coming out to be 0, I also don’t know how you defined “Sales”, I named the entire data array as that and even then none of the values were coming!